Category Archives: inspiration

When I started this personal blog of things that I found inspirational, I never thought I would find an outlet that so many other people would connect with. Since March 2010, I’ve been fortunate enough to watch the site visits grow and grow, eventually adding up to tens of thousands of unique visitors. Just about a year and half old, The Byczek Blog has, proverbially, grown too big for it’s britches and a transformation of some sort was bound to happen.

I’m happy to announce that I have launched a new site, The Exaltation, with the purpose of not only sharing what I love and admire, but expanding to include a team of incredibly talented and thoughtful friends and colleagues. The Exaltation is all about high praise for art, design, architecture, films, music, fashion, events, products and whatever else we feel is worth sharing and celebrating. The site will hopefully grow steadily and morph along the way, and I look forward to cultivating a great site worthy of it’s name. I want to thank you for all your support and hope that you’ll find just as much inspiration in the new project.

Earlier this week, one of my favorite photographers, Kim Holtermand, announced an awesome new project in collaboration with film makers Scenic and fellow visionary Tim Navis. Outliers, Volume 1, aims to create a series of short films in and around the beautiful and mysterious Icelandic countryside. A Kickstarter project has already launched and you can pledge funds now until September, with a whole range of tiers with some great and unique gifts for your support, like limited edition books celebrating the project and one-off prints and stills of their sure-to-be impressive work.

Charleston, South Carolina based design and branding firm Fuzzco has been quietly producing expertly crafted branding and design projects for a couple of years now and with a recent rave review by Brand New for the rebranding of restaurant chain Kickin’ Chicken, their status is sure to rise. Their work is consistently smart and clean with wonderful little details & clever copywriting, and many of their projects often include great illustrations and icon sets.

Not exactly “breaking news” but AIGA, the nation’s largest organization devoted to the profession of design, recently relaunched and redesigned their website and it’s a radical departure for a somewhat staid institution. Adopting the ever more popular website style I refer to as “Chinese Buffet”, the AIGA site no longer has a traditional flow or “above the fold” content layout, but a scalable column system of multiple content boxes and “ads” that shift position depending on the size of your browser. It’s a layout and design that could look disastrous, cluttered and unfocused in the wrong hands, but AIGA wisely and subtly creates hierarchy and order amidst the chaos, especially in the nice touches of blog-style tags and categories, and greying out certain columns of information that only become more apparent when scrolled over, leading your wandering eyes in a more curated way.

It’s not a perfect design, but it’s a great evolutionary step for a web presence devoted to the multitudes of graphic arts and creativity. I personally hate when you maximize your browser window to take full advantage of the reshuffling tiles, only to scroll down to find certain columns are exceedingly and inexplicably longer than others. But it’s a minor quibble that could easily be fixed by allowing all the tiles to reshuffle freely.

This buffet style of web design, where you pick and choose what content to access and what to avoid is not for everyone, but for AIGA, an organization devoted to the visual craft of design and it’s myriad forms and developments, it’s a great opportunity to showcase lots of talent, events, and social activity that can keep you educated and entertained long after a more traditional layout would have.

Gotta be honest, it was hard to whittle down the fantastic work of Melbourne, Australia’s A Friend of Mine to three post images. With smart, incredibly intricate work like the VCE Season of Excellence branding (a series of paper cutouts for a university exhibition) to great, clever logos (like Kitsch & Tea on their website) and a breadth of knowledge on appropriate and eye-catching design techniques (like the church opening seen above), their portfolio is treasure trove of inspirational ideas, all expertly executed.

I included a Lissy Elle image last year in a “Weekly Stimuli” installment (what happened to that feature you may ask? It’s returning soon, but in a more robust form) and knew a dedicated post to her and her work was long overdue. Lissy photographs – sometimes manipulated, edited, photoshopped or staged – are often fantastical and sometimes macabre. They are all expertly composed with little elements you may not catch on first viewing. They have that elusive quality of being able to suck you in, and give the impression they are perhaps a still from a magical film or part of a much bigger story.

The other aspect I find remarkable is that all of Lissy’s work in some shape or form is either injected with a deep feminine tone or translates metaphors and themes most often associated with that gender. In doing so, the images feel as if they are exploring deeply personal thoughts and feelings while simultaneously capturing highly relatable emotional and visual territory.

“There is no globally recognized logo for human rights. Together we can close this gap. Join the greatest creative challenge in history and submit your logo design now.”

This is the opening line that visitors to the recently launched HumanRightsLogo.net are greeted with. A call to (friendly) arms for all designers out there to create a universally understood logo, or symbol, to signify “human rights”, with a prize awarded by a prestigious jury of humanitarians. Though the premise and the problem seem simple enough, the undertaking is conceptually enormous, and with over 2000 submissions and growing, very few, in my opinion, are hitting the mark.

About the Byczek blog

The Byczek Blog was the personal blog of Bryan Byczek. "Was" because it is now shuttered. But fear not, this blog may be closed but in it's wake is a bigger, better website filled with lots more creative inspiration by a great team of talented folks. Visit the new site here: The Exaltation